penn jillette is a worthless sack of shit. i agree with him on somethings but he is just a massive cock. he is a master of the straw man. his piece on the americans with disabilities act is repulsive. he goes around exploiting people, showing how stupid people can be. then he turns around and says "people don't need government to be nice to each other and create a level playing field, we would do it naturally on our own and have been." except for penn who profits from showing how stupid people can be.

only an a-historical, hypocritical jackass would say that. how is it that in another reality religion would be recreated differently but the science to disprove it wouldn't? keep us updated on your a-historical scientific discoveries of eternal Truths, penn. even karl popper gave up that fight. take a look at the history of science before you blow your objective load of nonsense all over the straw men you love so much.

vonDrehle wrote:So you don't see he is just making the point that religion is fiction real and science is factual?

what?

religion is a fact. it exists, science isn't necessary to demonstrate the existence of religion.

science has produced a ton of fiction. next time your four humours are unbalanced, give yourself a bloodletting or take some mercury. if you survive the blood letting and mercury poisoning, maybe you can return to alchemy, phrenology, or studying the ptolemaic system.

penn believes science is an ahistorical, noncontextual Truth producing machine from the quote i posted. he is a follower of ayn rand's objectivist philosophy that believes humans can have an unmediated relationship with the world and that he possesses it. penn is not a scientist. he literally has a degree from a clown college. penn cloaks his political beliefs and skepticism in a bizarre mixture straw men and confirmation bias that he calls Truth. science is a contextual and changing system of knowledge production that adapts and attempts to explain previous errors- see karl popper's concept of falsifiability .

science is a better knowledge producing system than faith and mysticism but it is not infallible.

It is sad that you have to know a lot to be able to call bullshit sometimes because so many people who have degrees in programs that teaches sciences make absurd unverifiable claims if examined with due process. And we all pay for it. And then there is misquoting. Have you heard the claim that almost all of the communication is non verbal? It is a famous misquote that is true for the first few seconds of meeting people whom you've never met before. Comms get very verbally dominated later on. Then there is the common sense bug. Maslow developed a well known need hierarchy for people. What ain't so commonly known is that the test he made was conducted on insane asylum patients. That is like asking what jews are like when the test sample is Adolf Hitler. Oops.

Flat shots need running on the center line of the tee and planting each step on the center line. Anhyzer needs running from rear right to front left with the plant step hitting the ground to the left of the line you're running on. Hyzer is the mirror of that.

So we wipe everyone out and start over the Earth will not revolve around the sun, water will not be made of 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom, and babies will not be created by a sperm and an egg? Science isn't always correct but it acknowledges that and keeps changing.

So we wipe everyone out and start over the Earth will not revolve around the sun, water will not be made of 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom, and babies will not be created by a sperm and an egg? Science isn't always correct but it acknowledges that and keeps changing.

Some religious text is at least partially right. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed etc. were real live people. There are accounts of historical events and persons (however inaccurately portrayed though). The messages are mixed and different interpreters interpret the messages very differently. Let alone applying variations.

Flat shots need running on the center line of the tee and planting each step on the center line. Anhyzer needs running from rear right to front left with the plant step hitting the ground to the left of the line you're running on. Hyzer is the mirror of that.

but how long will it take to make those discoveries the next time? will those discoveries even be made again? will anybody care or have the time, means, and energy to even investigate such matters?

conservatively, modern humans have been around for at least 50,000 years. the current understanding of sperm penetrating an egg as necessary for reproduction didn't occur until 159 years ago. that means for ~.998% of human existence, the commonly held beliefs and truths about how reproduction occurred were wrong. even how we got to our current understanding is an interesting journey... http://www.seductionlabs.org/2007/04/02 ... -of-sperm/ it didn't occur because of some magical unfurling of knowledge or the positive, linear progress of science.

for penn to say that "somebody would figure it all out again" is as just as dogmatic a view of science, objectivity and Truth as any dogmatic religious belief.

if anybody wants to waste 19:35 minutes of their life, watch penn's atheist guide to the 2012 election. all he does is tell you about a book he read and then goes on and on about how dumb and crazy religious people are. his use of stats on religion is skeptical at best. i'm an atheist and not a fan of organized religion. however, penn's understanding of why people believe in religion is childish and pedestrian. it's people like him that make atheists one of the most distrusted groups in america. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... ts/250005/while he doesn't believe in god, his belief that he is objective and correct is no different than any religious belief.

The court room part is one of the things that always bothered me about Christianity. In the Bible God tells people to do some crazy shit and everyone is cool with that. When someone says, "God told me to" today they are generally considered nutty.

jsun3thousand wrote:...science is a contextual and changing system of knowledge production that adapts and attempts to explain previous errors- see karl popper's concept of falsifiability...science is a better knowledge producing system than faith and mysticism but it is not infallible.

Be careful not to contradict yourself. Fallibility is the hallmark of science. Science is a method of learning, and often times that means learning that you were previously wrong. That's why it is so powerful, and so practical. Science isn't about being right, it's about discovering when you're wrong in the most efficient way possible.

Religion, on the other hand, is inflexible. Some people find comfort in that, and I understand the desire for that kind of thing. Ignorance is bliss, right? But even this ends up in trouble, because there are so many different interpretations within religion, that factions inevitably develop, people become divided and sometimes antagonistic against one other, and nobody learns anything through the process. Nothing that religion has ever done has inherently improved the condition of humankind. That's a really hard truth.